


Kaleidos

by boychik



Category: Hatoful Kareshi | Hatoful Boyfriend
Genre: Chromesthesia, Drabble, Gen, Music, Piano, Synaesthesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 05:39:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boychik/pseuds/boychik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the spaces between notes, Sakuya hangs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kaleidos

The first time Sakuya heard a piano, he couldn’t get the colors out of his head.

A low chord called up an image of a shadowy glade, the moonlight diffuse through heart-shaped leaves. A smattering of small, high notes felt like a group of fireflies or fairies swooping through the air. In the spaces between notes, Sakuya hangs.

It was the maid who played that day. She was taking a break from cleaning the Le Bel mansion, understandable given its immensity—several bedrooms and a dozen bathrooms, with almost a hundred windows to clean, a thousand dishes to wash, floors to scour, statues to polish, countless plants to water—and had sat down on the plush black bench and sponged off a layer of dust from the cover over the keys. She obviously thought that no one was there, for in the Le Bel household, servants were expendable creatures; one moment of rest was a slip-up, one slip-up and a bird could be shipped back to their lowly nest in a heartbeat and replaced with another fresh-feathered partridge or dove. Mother and father had gone out, and unusually, Sakuya was left behind to wander the enormous house.

He was considering telling mother and father about the whole debacle when the maid laid her wings over the keys and began to play. The pianoforte was a notoriously difficult instrument for birds to master, but she did well. Her song was quick and light, some sort of minuet in a major key. She was no maestro—the tips of her feathers occasionally stuck between the ivories as she ripped through an especially fast passage—but she played with grace and care. Sakuya stood outside the parlor door and listened in awe. The way the music dipped and whirled was unlike anything he had ever heard. From the stream of sound he could discern a flow of colors and shapes, kaleidoscopic and fluid. Blue triangle trees dripped into silver circles wheeled into red rockets shooting through the sky morphing into kiwi-green volcanoes spewing stars. Even after she ceased to play, he could see colors hanging on the inside of his eyelids, the aftermath of song.

His parents came back but didn’t ask how he was, so he didn’t tell them. He just floated through their fancy rooms, picked up a kaleidoscope and looked through it to see if it compared to the beautiful forms ringing and whirling inside his head. It wasn’t even close.

The next time his parents went out, he sat down on the bench and picked through the keys. He knew nothing and had to find his own way through dissonance to hesitant melodies, soft and white, black keys slowly creeping into the mix of notes. After a while he felt eyes on his back, and turned to see if there was anyone at the door.

It was the maid. He jumped up, alarmed—would she tell his parents? she couldn’t!—but caught only a fleeting smile before she turned the corner and flew up the marble staircase or maybe down the other staircase or…somewhere in that vast house of his.

Sakuya never saw her again. Sometimes when he plays, a smile hovers about the piano, or the brush of her wingtips is there but not there. Mostly though, she is reduced to the bloom of sound and light inside his brain, present and splendid when the music plays.

**Author's Note:**

> How the heck do birds play the piano, anyway?
> 
> For real, I'll be thinking about it and then I'll be like welp, I can't think about this anymore.


End file.
